Merry Christmas, everyone! As folks gather around the fire with their families this Christmas, remember that periodic chimney maintenance is incredibly important. If your chimney is full of soot and creosote, it can cause a dangerous chimney fire. This is precisely what happened at the Abbott School Dormitory on one cold December night in 1917. Old South Congregational Church Reverend Paul Gordon Favor (you may remember him as the pastor who got lost up on Mount Blue with a bunch of youngsters in September of that year) gave a detailed account of the fire. So, this month, we will join Rev. Favor on that fateful night. Let us go back…

It is the night of December 6, 1917. The Great War is raging in Europe, and just earlier today, the city of Halifax, Nova Scotia experienced an explosion that was the result of the collision of two ships, with over 1,500 people dead (this was one of the largest non-nuclear explosions in history). Sometime between 9:30 and 10, two blasts of the fire alarm are heard in the vicinity of the Abbott School for Boys. Rev. Favor puts on his boots and a jacket, and books it in the direction of the school.

Arriving before the fire department, Favor meets up with Abbott School Athletic Director Ralph W. Roberts. The dormitory of the school is on fire, with flames escaping from a chimney. Upon meeting Coach Roberts, the two men traverse the burning building, reaching a ladder leading to a skylight on the roof. Several of the stronger Abbott Boys are also there, carrying extra fire extinguishers. The coach and the reverend climb up the ladder and onto the roof.

Now on the roof of the burning building, Favor and Roberts go through about a dozen fire extinguishers while fighting the blaze, tossing them to the ground when they are depleted. At first, the snow on the roof keeps the fire somewhat manageable. Once the snow has melted, however, the blaze soon burns out of control. Soon, both men are enveloped in thick smoke. In a hasty retreat, Roberts instructs Favor to crawl backwards on the ridge-line of the roof back to the skylight.

The reverend goes too far, and misses the skylight, while Coach tumbles down the fiery opening, singeing his hair and eyebrows. At this point, Favor needs to make a decision: stay up on the roof and succumb to the flames and smoke or jump into the fiery hole to escape. Roberts calls up to Favor, “Come on Favor! You must man. You must. Quick or too late!” The reverend hears the voice of God telling him to jump, and he does. At the bottom of the ladder, Coach Roberts catches Rev. Favor. In the coach’s arms, Favor looks over and remarks, “Thank you, old man, you saved me.” The two men then evacuate the burning building.

Fortunately, nobody was injured or killed in the burning of the Abbott School Dormitory. Roberts and Favor’s effort helped save half of the building, while the back half was gutted. The fire department did arrive, but as the temperatures were near zero, the water lines were frozen. Most of the boys lost their belongings in the fire, and some furniture was damaged from trying to move it out of the building. Headmaster Church sent the young men of Abbott home for Christmas early.

It’s important to note that this was the night that killed the Abbott School. With a burned dormitory (which the United States Government would not allow to be renovated to the extent that the headmaster wanted due to war rationing of materials), along with most male teachers being away in the war, Headmaster Church had to close the school at the end of the 1917-1918 school year. While the Abbott School eventually did reopen in the early 1920s, it wasn’t as successful as it had been under the leadership of George Dudley Church. The school closed permanently around 1930, after an unsuccessful rebranding as the “Abbott Junior College” in 1928 and as an effect of the Great Depression (Story sourced from the Lewiston Daily Sun, 1917).

Layne Nason is a Farmington historian, specializing in the history of the Abbott School for Boys and Farmington during the era of the Great War.

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